Some light relief from the ongoing debate on management consoles – a real blast from the past – from the days of SYSCON.

Here is SNIPES. It’s fifteen years old this year.

You can download your own copy of SNIPES from Novell – it’s part of the NetWare Lite 1.1 update. Now doesn’t that make you feel warm, fuzzy and old.. Just download and run the NLSNIPES.EXE binary. 18k of DOS goodness.

was i shouting when novell consulting, about 6.5 years ago, installed and launched consoleone on my admin workstation. at that time i had just filled a position in an nt server engineering group at an international company located in zuerich, switzerland. before that position i was working in a small company as a web and database developer and, on the side, was also managing that company’s netware environment. i was away from the novell business for about 6 months only, and so i expected to get good old nwadmin on my box but in stead: “what the heck!” i got consoleone. a java application that took about 2 minutes to start and offered only limited managing capabilities at that time.

i wonder how many “what the heck!”s went around the globe when, after consoleone had finally matured, it was violently killed and replaced by imanager, a terribly clumsy and slow web application at that time and offering only limited managing capabilities.

and i hope we caused at least as many “what the heck!”s when we shipped designer for identity manager 1.0 mid last year. but this time not because we did a brutal rip and replace of an existing admin tool. instead we added to what was already there. we brought the rich client back onto the novell administrators and developers workstations. the echo so far has been overwhelmingly positive.

so have we finally found the right balance? is designer the answer to all the cry-outs for help: “i want a rich client!”. until my very last day in novell consulting i had console one installed on my laptop but i considered myself a dinosaur. i had the chance to work with a good friend from consulting recently and as i asked him to log into my development tree, i expected him to login using imanager but “what the heck!” this good old friend, in the year 2006, launched consoleone!

More on the open source project front … Novell has released additional source code to the iFolder project. Now it’s the iFolder server components that are open source. The project has previously included the iFolder clients for Linux, Macintosh and Windows. The server components include the full iFolder server, with administration, policy management and the …

To manage its Microsoft environment, M&T Bank evaluated 10 different software vendors and selected Novell ZENworks to manage its 2,000 ATMs and more than 15,000 desktops. With remote management from a central location, the bank no longer has to dispatch technicians to update each ATM — a cost savings of $500 for each visit. With …

A wiki (IPA: [ˈwi�?.ki�?] or [ˈwɪ.ki�?][1]) is a type of website that allows users to easily add, remove, or otherwise edit all content, very quickly and easily, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative writing. The term wiki is a shortened form of wiki wiki which is from the native language of Hawaii (Hawaiian), where it is commonly used as an adjective to denote something “quick” or “fast”.

The Cool Solutions Wiki is a central spot for all of that ‘other important information’ that should be shared across the community. Sometimes created by Novell people; most often by you – our customers, partners and developers.

The content is as good as the community. Like one large ‘pot luck meal’ – if we all bring something good we’ll have a feast. The vast majority of wiki sites become the body of knowledge for the broader community – I’ve already plugged Wikipedia – but other sites as diverse as the WordPress Codex to Science of Spectroscopy use the Wiki structure to facilitate rapid and broad information sharing.

Sounds like a public information film eh? All very co-operative and liberal.

Take a look at the Novell Cool Solutions Wiki – and think for a moment. Do you have a morsel of information that can be shared? Can you spare a minute or two to jot it down.

Let me know your comments, feedback and whether the Cool Solutions Wiki is useful. I’ll see if I can whistle up some ‘Evil ZEN Scientist’ T-shirts for the best few articles that get written as a result of this post. Bribery always works.

Novell is participating in today’s Linux on Wall Street conference at several levels. First, we put out a joint release today with Reuters at the show about support for the Reuters Market Data System on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Obviously, something like this is demand driven, so it’s nice to know that financial service firms …